Today's growing interdependence among nations seemingly ended the days of absolute national sovereignty. But national culture, character, and identity continue to persist and matter.

Japanese identity in America: Participants in the Missouri botanical Gardens' 1998 Japanese Festival walk in procession in the opening ceremony, beating drums and holding flags.

he present generation, for the first time in history, is experiencing a unity such that nothing essential can happen anywhere that does not concern all. The Stoic understanding of unity, the framework of the polis, has been expanded to include the whole of humankind. Today's growing interdependence among nations seemingly has ended the days of absolute national sovereignty. Almost imperceptibly a new attitude has developed regarding interdependence, so much so that a United States of Europe is regarded as an imminent possibility. As Europeans debate an EU constitution, the loss of national sovereignty looms with unacknowledged consequences.
        This eradication of national identity is occurring at the same time that there is a widespread awareness that the West has lost some of the spiritual resources that animated its past. In a memorable passage written in the first decades of the twentieth century, George Santayana (1863--1952), a Spanish-born Harvard University professor, expressed it this way:
        "The present age is a critical one and interesting to live in. The civilization characteristic of Christendom has not disappeared, yet another civilization has begun to take its place. We still understand the value of religious faith. ... On the other hand, the shell of Christendom is broken. The unconquerable mind of the East, the pagan past, the industrial socialist future confront it with equal authority. On the whole life and mind is saturated with the slow upward filtration of a new spirit--that of an emancipated, atheistic, international democracy.1"
        Santayana was not alone in his assessment. Philosophers and theologians as diverse as Friedrich Nietzsche and Pope Leo XIII addressed the new intellectual climate shaping nineteenth-century European thought. Old patterns of thought were losing the allegiance of the European intelligentsia. Lost was a confidence that the inherited could withstand the assault of the new science and technology and the progress it implied. Nietzsche and later Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, each in his own way, called for a return to classical Greece as the source for an understanding of Western culture. Leo XIII recommended the work of philosopher-theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas as the antidote to the nihilism and anti-Christian spirit that animated the intellectual climate in the mid-1800s.
        Discussion in philosophical circles tended to focus on the meaning of the concept of "Europe." English author Hilaire Belloc could confidently assert that "Europe is the Faith, the Faith is Europe," but that view was not widely shared in the intellectual circles of his day by the philosophers of Enlightenment parentage who thought they had eradicated Christianity. The classical sources of Western culture could not be denied, but was that the whole story? French poet and philosopher Paul Val‚ry, we shall subsequently see, would answer with an emphatic no.

ANCIENT GREECE AND THE WEST

n his 1935 lecture "Philosophy and the Crisis of European Humanity," Husserl offered an analysis of Europe's spiritual and intellectual crisis that looked to ancient Greece as a way out of the crisis facing the West. Husserl found in the Greek spirit of philosophical inquiry the sources for "free and universal theoretical reflection" that would serve as a model for a "supranational" ideal of reason. In Husserl's words, "There are only two escapes from the crisis of European existence: the downfall of Europe in its estrangement from its own rational sense of life, its fall into hostility toward the spiritual into barbarity; or the rebirth of Europe from the spirit of philosophy through a heroism of reason that overcomes naturalism once and for all."2
        Like his mentor Husserl, Heidegger similarly attempted to show that a revival of the Greek heritage was essential to the future of the West. Heidegger looked upon Germany as the privileged nation whose historical mission is to save the West "when the spiritual strength of the West fails and the West starts to come apart at the seams."3 Notably, in his several speeches on the Hellenic patrimony of the West, Heidegger omits any reference to Roman Catholicism and Roman humanism.
        Historians remind us that cultures do not develop in a linear order of historical growth but grow sporadically, unlike the causal determinism characteristic of science and technology. By the third century b.c. Greece was on the threshold of modern science, but that science had to await the sixteenth century before the intellect of Western man had achieved the necessary understanding of the relation of science to technology. Distinctive cultural patterns arising from religious, social, economic, and political factors provided the necessary condition.
        The well-known historian of science and technology Lynn White, in a colorful phrase, reminds us that "the [Benedictine] monk was the first intellectual [in the history of the West] to get dirt under his fingernails."4 Speaking of the Benedictine, White goes on to say, "He did not immediately launch into scientific investigation, but in his very person he destroyed the old artificial barrier between the empirical and the speculative, the manual and the liberal arts and thus helped create a social atmosphere favorable to scientific and technological development."5 White offers his observations in the context of his essay "Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered," noting that "St. Bernard's Cistercian monks were so devoted to the Virgin that every one of their hundreds of monasteries was dedicated to her; yet these White Benedictines seem often to have led the way in the use of power. Some of their abbeys had four or five water wheels, each powering a different workshop."6 He then makes the important point that
        "the Virgin and the dynamo are not opposing principles permeating the universe; they are allies. The growth of medieval power technology ... is a chapter in the conquest of freedom. More than that, to those who search out "why it happened," it is a part of the history of religion. The humanitarian technology which in later centuries had grown from medieval

Clash of identities: On January 17, 2004, Palestinian women at the Rafah refugee camp in southern Gaza chant anti-French slogans during a protest against the proposal to bar Muslim women from wearing head scarves in France's public schools.

seeds was not rooted in economic necessity for such "necessity" is inherent in every society, yet has found expression only in the Occident, nourished in the tradition of Western theology. It is ideas which make necessities conscious. The labor-saving power machines of the latter Middle Ages were harmonious with the religious assumptions of the worth of even the most seemingly degraded human personality.7 "
        Modernity since the European Enlightenment has acquired an implacable faith in progress. Success achieved in science and technology fostered the belief that a similar success is possible in economics, politics, and the social order. Defects in human institutions were to be approached with confidence that they, too, could be remedied with time as if they were problems in physics or mechanics. Lost was an awareness of the distinctive culture and its sources that made Western achievement possible. Those sources lie in classical antiquity, in the Hellenism and Christianity that gave us confidence that the human intellect is powerful enough to ferret out the secrets of an intelligible and purposive nature. This confidence is at once the root of science and technology and the rule of law as reflected in Western social and political institutions. Those laws and institutions create "a people" to the extent that they are lived, not simply recorded on parchment or engraved in marble or bronze but are instilled in the minds and dispositions of citizens.
        Just as looking into the past is an essential route to finding oneself, so too a people or a nation needs to understand its past. The German word Bildung is useful insofar as it signifies a process, a process that is a continuum of impressions and evaluations that cumulatively give one a sense of belonging to a collective with a distinctive heritage. Only in such a Bildung in which family ties, fostered and perpetuated by love and reverence for forefathers, is it likely that freedom and the rule of law will prevail. Social cooperation depends on national identity. To respect one's people is not tantamount to respecting whatever repressive government may have been thrust upon them in the past.

POLITICAL VS. CULTURAL NATIONALISM

point that needs to be underscored is the distinction between political and cultural nationalism. Belloc could proclaim, "Spiritually we are all Semites." Despite a certain common spiritual and cultural affinity, rendered increasingly evident as Islam rises in opposition to the West, cultural differences within Europe exist and define national identity. The recent tiff between Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi and German Chancellor Schroeder is indeed amusing and need not be taken seriously, but there is a German national character, an Italian character, and a French character, and the world is richer for it. An outsider would not want these traits to disappear.
        It is more difficult to define an American character since, until recently, it was an amalgam of the many strains found in Europe that came with the various immigrant groups. But questionable immigration policy and the failure to integrate African descendants into what is essentially European culture have strained both educational standards

Greek identity in America: New Yorkers attempt to guess the exact number of olives inside a jar to win a trip to Greece during the Ninth Avenue International Food Fair, May 1998.

and manners and morals. Standards of behavior have been shifted to the lowest common denominator. There is little doubt that the identity of the American people is being eroded as a result of a political emphasis on diversity and multiculturalism. Moreover, the campaign for inclusion points to a more insidious form of diversity, that existing between the culture of the intellectuals and the culture of farmers, manufacturers, and tradesmen, sometimes referred to as the difference between middle America and the eastern seaboard intelligentsia.
        National identity is a challenge to be faced both in Europe and North America. Absent a common bond in the people, absent a cultural identity, can the laws, let alone those customs and transactions that depend on virtue, long survive? England, as a result of its immigration and asylum policy, is losing its identity to the chagrin of native Englishmen. The newcomers, in bringing their own culture with them, eschew British traditions, creating enclaves of their own to the detriment of the larger society. Some say the Englishman we know from history, literature, and film is becoming extinct, with the sovereignty of the country itself in jeopardy as the European Union erodes Britain's self-governance and national identity. Is this to the good?
        Perhaps we should more properly speak of European identity. Val‚ry, writing in the first quarter of the twentieth century, gives us a very broad definition of Europe. Europe is more than a geographical designation, he insists. "There is a certain trait, quite distinct from race, nationality, and even language which unites the countries of the West and Central Europe making them all alike."8 "Wherever the names of Caesar, Caius, Trajan, and Virgil, of Moses and St. Paul and Aristotle, Plato and Euclid have had simultaneous meaning and authority, there is Europe."9 Again, "Every race and land that has been successfully Romanized, Christianized and as regards the mind, disciplined by the Greeks, is absolutely European."10 Shakespeare, he points out, is an integral part of French, Italian, and German culture; so, too, Goethe and Dante. If Val‚ry were part of the commission drafting the European Constitution,11 he would insist that it contain reference to both Christianity and the character of Europe.12 Christianity introduced a universal moral law that took its place alongside the juridical unity contributed by Roman law. In other words, Christianity in taking all it could from Rome gave us a common law, a common God, one and the same temporal judge, and one and the same judge in eternity. Val‚ry continues:
        "Christianity proposed to the mind the most subtle, the greatest, and indeed the most fruitful of problems. Whether it were a question of the value of testimony, the criticism of texts, or the sources and guarantees of knowledge; of the distinction between faith and reason, and the opposition that arises between them or the antagonism between faith, deeds, and works; a question of freedom, servitude, or grace; of spiritual and material power, and their mutual conflict, the equality of men, the status of women--and how much else?--Christianity educated and stimulated millions of minds, making them act and react, century after century.13"
        Having acknowledged the influence of Christianity, Val‚ry turns to the role of classical learning. He speaks of the " ... subtle yet powerful influence to which we owe the best of our intelligence, the acuteness and solidity of our knowledge, as also the clarity, purity, and elegance of our arts and literature: it is from Greece that those virtues came to us."14 What we owe to Greece, he maintains, is perhaps what has most profoundly distinguished us from the rest of humanity. Europe is above all the creator of science. While there have been arts in all countries, there has been true science only in Europe. Val‚ry's assessment may be contrasted with Heidegger's, whose analysis placed the emphasis on Greece and ignored two of Europe's most fundamental traditions, Roman Catholicism and Roman humanism.
        With such a sweeping definition of Europe, can there be national identity within Europe or even a distinction between Europe and North America? What Val‚ry means by Europe is almost identical to what is referred to today as the West, a term used sometimes to designate not only Europe and the Americas but Japan and other parts of Asia that are indebted to Western science and technology, if not religion.

WHAT IS A NATION?

t is not easy to define clearly what a nation is. A line traced on a map and on the ground, constituting a frontier, is the result of a series of historical incidents sanctioned by treaties. It may separate countries that are alike and join others that are very different. There is a tendency to generalize characteristics that are far from indicative of the whole. Few have difficulty speaking of "the Italian," "the German," "the Englishman." These broad, imprecise designations may serve a purpose in colloquial speech and may be indicative of certain prejudices, positive and negative. Yet they do have some foundation in reality, in pointing out national or cultural traits. It may be easier to differentiate between oriental traits and occidental ones than between Polish and Czech ones. Color, custom, and culture differentiate; so also do opinions, prejudices, and evaluations.
        Is a rapprochement among the different peoples of Europe, say between eastern and western Europe, inevitable? With the creation of the European Union, many are now face to face who heretofore have never looked on each other as anything but radically

To understand a nation, be it England, France, Germany, or Italy, we must attend to what each has created in the realm of the mind, expressions of intelligence or knowledge.

foreign. No doubt contact has resulted in the acknowledgment of certain virtues in the other, or some superiority, some strength, agility, industry, or other virtues we identify with national character.
        National character is difficult to define. The history of most countries of Europe is a chronicle of extremes, a chain of peaks and abysses. Some seem fated by geographical structure, water resources, climate, soil, flora, and fauna to play a pivotal role on a grand scale. Germany rises, staggers, falls, rises again, retrenches, recaptures her greatness, is rent in two, and reunites, displaying by turn qualities of pride, resignation, unconcern, and ardor, standing out from other nations by a distinct character.
        A certain natural discipline, apparent in the German character, comes to the fore when needed. Sometimes the nation is suddenly united when one would expect it to be divided. Moreover, the simplest and broadest features of any nation are likely to go unnoticed by the inhabitants themselves, since they tend to be oblivious to what they have always experienced. It is the foreigner who notices those features and may make too much of them. One must also realize that whereas the effects of man's labor with respect to his surroundings are clearly recognizable, the modifications in man himself brought about by his place of residence are likely to be obscure.
        A summer 2003 travel advertisement tells us that the Greek island Santorini was shaped by its natural cataclysms, but its villages and landscapes seem chiseled by the island's stark light. Out of that light came not only the great statues of ancient Greece and the long, clean lines of the Parthenon but the precise vocabulary for ideas that gave birth to Western philosophy.
        The reader may miss a middle term connecting land, sky, and philosophy, but the words are worthy of some reflection. The effects of sky, the water, the air one breathes, the prevailing winds, and what one eats are physiological and psychological. Manners, ideals, politics are the incalculable effects of subtle causes. The Bavarian is not an Englishman, and not simply because of language. The contours of a land that nourishes its people are but one aspect of a complex whole. Location, ethnic composition, a psychological constitution equally contribute to national identity.
        To understand a nation, be it England, France, Germany, or Italy, we must attend to what each has created in the realm of the mind, expressions of intelligence or knowledge. The total intellectual and artistic treasure, the accumulated beauty of great works of art, written, sculpted, painted, or constructed is constitutive of a culture that would not exist apart from its roots in a particular national setting.
        Every nation of Europe is a composite, the result of the different ethnic elements that came to be mixed within her territory, and in none of them is a single tongue spoken. Paul Val‚ry said of France, "The French nation resembles a tree several times grafted, the quality and flavor of whose fruit are the result of a happy wedding of very different saps and humors combining in a single and indivisible life."15 Stretching a bit, he continues, "Whether we speak of the Capelins, of Joan of Arc, Louis IX, Henry IV, Richelieu, the Convention, or Napoleon, we are referring to one and the same thing, an active symbol of our national identity and unity."16

DOES IT MATTER?

oes the preservation of national identity matter? It matters to hosts of immigrants in both Europe and North America who seek to retain not only their inherited customs but even their native language in their adopted countries. It matters because traditions, the components of what we call a culture, are specific. One cannot be a citizen of the world. Identity is local; it is the characteristic of a people who have inhabited a land over a period of time, who have developed certain collective habits, evident in their manners, their dress, the feasts they collectively enjoy, their religious bonds, the premium they put on education, and their attention to detail and precision. These are not universal traits but are rooted in centuries past and depend upon a historical consciousness, an attention to the deeds of ancestors past.
        National identity is threatened from two sources: the immigrant who refuses to assimilate and the secular, aggressively anti-Christian international socialist whose mentality permeates the major media, the entertainment industries, and the universities. The nation that is conscious of its past may be the only bulwark against the neopaganism that seeks to replace Christianity throughout the West. Cultural and moral standards are specific and cannot be held in vacuo, apart from particular peoples, periods, and places. Even the universal works of the mind, philosophy, and science are subject to the hidden influence of race, local habit, and milieu. In fact, nothing seems to define a nation or region better than the philosophy it has produced or the adherence to the rule of law under which it functions. We speak of classical metaphysics, French literature, nineteenth-century German philosophy, and in the United States of the southern agrarians.
        A nation or people can be energized only internally, by the goals it sets for itself in the light of a shared perception of the common good. These social and political modes of life cannot be imposed from without, as the United States has discovered in Iraq. So-called emerging nations cannot be expected to embrace lock, stock, and barrel the social and political modes of life that are urged on them from without. Anthropologists have, of course, realized all along what policy makers have been slow to acknowledge. In spite of the craving for economic advancement, who does, in fact, want to live in a "world culture"? Given media-driven amoral standards, such a culture would be beneath the dignity of human nature.
        In talking about declining moral standards, perhaps no one has put the matter more succinctly than John M. Rist in his book Real Ethics.17 Rist foresees a bleak future for the West. In losing its grip on its Christian past and in the absence of a clear sense of civic virtue, Western society is preparing itself for a totalitarian democracy. Unable to choose between conflicting claims to the good and the resulting propensity to tolerate all, it is subverting the principle of toleration itself.
        Unfortunately, recovering a sense of the past may not be an easy task. The past can be clouded by the authoritarian or ideological mentality of academics and humanists. Or it can be rewritten or reinvented to promote a political agenda. Moreover, history is only one

The leftist egalitarian project aims to erase borders in order that mass immigration to the First World from the Third will force citizens of the First to share their "superior" way of life.

vehicle for transmitting the inherited. Whatever wisdom a society has acquired can be passed on only if it is instantiated in institutional structures designed to maintain inherited practices, beliefs, and intellectual acumen. As for individuals caught in an unrooted modernity, those apt to keep their wits in a godless future are those who possess a knowledge--however acquired--of their roots, that is, their own past and traditions.
        It is through inherited literature in our native language that we become aware of our collective roots, develop common attitudes, and create a political culture. The Frenchman becomes a Frenchman not merely by reason of birth in a particular geographic territory but by reason of the literary tradition to which he is introduced early on. One develops a Catholic mind by reading the church fathers, Justin Martyr, Clement, Augustine, the medieval doctors of the church, and modern commentators thereon.
        In a 1934 essay, "The Sources of Cultural Change," the English historian Christopher Dawson offered this definition: "A culture is a common way of life--a particular adjustment of man to his natural surroundings and his economic needs." In its development it resembles a biological species. "Just as every natural region tends to possess its characteristic forms of vegetable and animal life, so too will it possess its own type of human society."18 Dawson identifies the three main influences that form and modify human culture; they are the same as in the formation of animal species. "They are (1) race, i.e., the genetic factor; (2) environment, i.e., the geographical factor; (3) function or occupation, i.e., the economic factors. But in addition to these there is a fourth element--thought or the psychological factor--which is peculiar to the human species and the existence of which frees man from the blind dependence on material environment."19

GLOBALIZATION

lthough the intimate linkage of science, technology, and commerce with rapid material progress and change typifies only a minor part of the world, it has assumed the status of a world culture with globalization as its hallmark. Leaders of emerging nations are urged to embrace globalization and to become part of the civilized world. If those leaders sense that the diffusion of a scientific world culture may threaten their indigenous cultures, they are sometimes assured that world culture is a purely material one incapable of impairing the spiritual content of a nation's heritage.
        Robert Locke, an American journalist, makes a suggestive distinction between "globalization" and "the globalists." As he defines it, globalization is an ongoing historical process, a factual description of how things are. Globalism, by contrast is an ideology, a set of political opinions about how things ought to be. Ideological globalists, in Locke's characterization, look upon the existence of separate nations as unacceptable because they foster inequality. "Separate nations give peoples with histories of brilliant political and economic achievement ... the free and prosperous lives that their forebears have earned while at the same time consigning peoples of inferior ancestral achievement to lesser existences."
        The leftist egalitarian project aims to erase borders in order that mass immigration to the First World from the Third will force citizens of the First to share their "superior" way of life. National cultural identity gives people an attachment to their land and history and consequently fosters global inequality.20 Locke may be guilty of some exaggeration, but the globalist spirit he detects is a reality all too often confronted.
        I am not suggesting that the problems facing Europe and North America are identical. Both have to deal with the consequences of their permissive immigration policies. The United States has the additional problem of an educational system that tends toward the lowest common denominator at all levels. Its universities have become politicized in a leftward direction. One can detect in the publications of major university presses a tendency to rewrite Western history, leaving out Christianity. The media on both sides of the Atlantic are uncompromising in their drive to undermine biblical morality and promoting deviant behavior at every turn, no matter the social consequences.
        Many who view the situation in the broad manner I am suggesting here end with an unrelieved pessimism. In fact, I have read no one who does not come to a pessimistic conclusion. Charles Murray, in a preview of his forthcoming book, concludes, "I write at a time when Europe's run appears to be over. Bleaker yet, there is reason to wonder whether European culture as we have known it will even exist at the end of this century."21
        Calls to return to the Greeks for a renewal of European political philosophy, such as those of Husserl and Heidegger, are not without warrant. The Greeks understood well the interdependence of polis and oikos, of public and private. In praising the polis as the highest level of human achievement, Aristotle did not ignore the private realm, nor did he undervalue the ties of family for the sake of an abstract polity. Rather he recognized that the city survives only as long as the private particular world of the family does. For Aristotle, that included piety of a religious sort as well as piety toward one's ancestors and one's state.22
        This fundamental Aristotelian position has been reiterated by Leo XIII in his antisocialist encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) and again by Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno (1931) and Pope John Paul II in Centissimus Anno (1991). Known in its modern form as the "principle of subsidiarity," it calls upon states to foster personal freedom and intermediate institutions for the sake of efficiency as well as the common good. In the words of Quadragesimo Anno, "Just as it is wrong to take away from individuals what they can accomplish by their own ability and effort and entrust it to a community, so too it is an injury and at the same time both a serious evil and a disturbance of right order to assign to a larger society what can be performed successfully by smaller and lower communities." Given the contemporary drive to concentrate power in central government, that principle remains relevant in both Brussels and Washington, D.C.

ENDNOTES
1. George Santayana, The Winds of Doctrine (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913), 1.
2. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and the Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 299.
3. Rector's Address, 1933/34, "The Self-Assertion of the German University," in The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Gunther Neske and Emil Kettering (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 19.
4. Lynn White, Machino ex deo: Essays in the Dynamism of Western Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968), 65.
5. White, Machino, 65.
6. White, Machino, 67.
7. White, Machino, 72--73.
8. Paul Val‚ry, Collected Works, trans. Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews (New York, Bollingen Foundation, 1962), 10: 322--23.
9. Val‚ry, Collected Works, 322.
10. Val‚ry, Collected Works, 323.
11. Even President Vladimir V. Putin, in discussing the role of his country vis-ˆ-vis the European Union, speaks of the value of Russian identity (New York Times, Oct. 6, 2003).
12. It may be observed that Val‚ry Giscard d'Estaing and the commission he heads to draft a European Constitution is, in its failure to note the Christian sources of European unity and culture, closer to Heidegger than to his French namesake.
13. Val‚ry, Collected Works, 3l9.
14. Val‚ry, Collected Works, 319.
15. Val‚ry, Collected Works, 407.
16. Val‚ry, Collected Works, 408.
17. John M. Rist, Real Ethical (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
18. Christopher Dawson, Dynamics of World History, ed. John J. Mulloy (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2002), 4.
19. Dawson, Dynamics, 5.
20. The American Conservative, June 2, 2003, 13--14.
21. Charles Murray, "Measuring Achievement: The West and the Rest," American Enterprise Institute, News & Commentary, posted Aug. 6, 2003, 12. That judgment is not uncommon.
22. For an extended treatment of the role of the family and its religion (cult) in creating the cohesiveness of society necessary for political stability and avoidance of tyrannical rule, see W. K. Lacey, The Family in Classical Greece (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968).